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A student of mine did a rather good thesis on de-clouding. In the process she discovered the term "cloud repatriation" a fair bit of literature on the movement

A student of mine did a rather good thesis on de-clouding. In the process she discovered the term "cloud repatriation" a fair bit of literature on the movement to bring control of data and hardware back 'on-prem'. She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. As companies move their operations out to the cloud it's not the disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of skill-sets. Later they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days.

silasdavis 4y ago
Perhaps you could link the thesis?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm definitely encouraging publication in a journal (maybe dealing with industry resilience). Also I want some students to come here and submit things via Show-HN, but they have to want to do that themselves.
  - mstade 4y ago
    Your abstract is very intriguing, I’d love to read the paper! Is there anything beyond commenting we can do to help encourage publishing?
karmakurtisaani 4y ago
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
turtlebits 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree. It's not de-skilling, it's not needing to hire a skilled/specialists to implement/operate. If you're using the cloud, you almost never need to consult or assign work to a network engineer. IME, reliance on DBAs is also way down.
pojzon 4y ago
Very easy to find those ppl, you just have to pull them out from Cloud Providers Data Centers. But you have to pay them enough or that is going to be like pulling teeth out. And this is where the problems start.
withinboredom 4y ago
Interestingly, I took a ~5 year hiatus from writing code right smack in the beginning of the "cloud phenomenon," and upon returning, realized how much things had changed, with both skill levels and specialization. Before my hiatus, a dev could/would single-handedly run a site for a small/medium business. Handling everything from server procurement to FTPing the files to the server and even server maintenance. When I got back, this was "a big no-no" and mostly frowned upon. Everything was deployed by "git push" (fancy FTP?), problem with a server? just deploy a new one, and if an AWS region goes down ... it's ok, everyone else is down too and we have no idea when it will be back. That last sentence was something you never said to a boss back in '07-08. You would always know what was wrong and how bad it was within a few minutes of the issue, at least 90%+ of the time anyway. You could probably even guess how long it would be down for within ~10-15 minutes of discovering the issue. FWIW, I think small/medium size businesses were/are probably the most affected by cloudification since those had the "most to gain" in the beginning. Then again, those were the types of businesses that I had the most interaction with until 2014-ish, I don't know what it looked like from a big-business perspective.
- Moissanite 4y ago
  The key to this is: which is worse for middle management; a 15 minute outage which is your fault, or a 2 hour outage you can blame on AWS? Cloud is to the IT department as big consulting companies are to HR.
  - gw99 4y ago
    I learned recently that the customers kick you in the balls once per minute either way. Loudly on Twitter.
    - nikau 4y ago
      Your average person doesn't listen to twitter, they listen to the mainstream news. And mainstream news will be either "company X offline for hours" if its just you, or "Amazon cloud outage takes multiple companies off line for hours" - the latter is better.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. Are you really suggesting that search engine providers are manipulating their own search results to bury some sort of hidden "truth" about a people leaving the cloud? Suggesting that people need to "dig deep" to find the real scale of the issue sounds a lot like the "do your own research" line that gets attached to dubious conspiracy theories. The simple explanation is that your student simply anchored her personal beliefs to an idea that this was a large movement, but her light research didn't match her pre-conceived beliefs. This is how conspiracy theories are born. Regardless, this claim doesn't hold up to even basic scrutiny. I just Googled for "cloud repatriation" and all of the results are think pieces about why moving out of the cloud is a good thing. Try it for yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=%22cloud+repatriation%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=... > A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. If you can't find sysadmins with basic competencies or engineers who can build systems as simple as buffering and transcoding, I can almost guarantee that the real issue is that you're not paying enough for the position. Either that, or the applicants can recognize from a mile away that your company is not the kind of place that skilled engineers actually want to work for. Don't mistake your lack of candidates for a lack of skill in the market.
- dirtball_ 4y ago
  That's right! It's a management problem through and through. Always has been.
- majormajor 4y ago
  It's less likely that search engines would manipulate this and much much much more likely that the SEO'd commercial content would be dominated by "move to the cloud!" type stuff because that's what's easy to sell these days. "Don't move to the cloud!" is hard to make money by selling to places not in the cloud. "Move out of the cloud" is harder to sell to places in the cloud than "move to the cloud" is to sell to places not in the cloud, because (a) bigger orgs with big budgets to make money off of tend to be older and not in the cloud fully in the first place and (b) moving out of the cloud is less turn-key - every client is going to be different and likely lower-margin than pushing clients into the same set of existing packaged cloud services. That said, I'm not aware of any companies from people in my network that are actively moving out of the cloud... so I also don't buy that it's a big trend.
Moissanite 4y ago
Very heartening to know other people are thinking about this. For about 4 or 5 years I've been warning about an equivalent problem in the HPC space, whereby even if on-prem is cheaper, companies will be forced to adopt cloud due to the lack of skilled bare-metal sysadmins. I should note that these warnings aren't accompanied by much sympathy; companies and academic institutions both do a profoundly terrible job at incubating the skills they need, then bleat at their local governments about new graduates not having the skills to be employable.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > companies will be forced to adopt cloud due to the lack of skilled bare-metal sysadmins. More likely that they're just not paying enough, and those skilled sysadmins would rather go to any other company that will pay them appropriately for their skills. This is just another take on the "nobody wants to work anymore" rant that happens when companies can't understand why nobody is accepting their open positions.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    I think both are actually true. Companies are not paying enough, but we also do not have as many opportunities (for SysAdmins) to learn things. Paid Internships, Jr Admin Roles, etc are fewer and far between, companies are looking for "experienced" people in a time where alot of the experience is retiring. Dont get me wrong there are plenty of us Gen X's out there with lots of experience but most of us are also massively over worked with limited opportunities given for us to train the next generation, so pay is only 1 part of this problem, head count is the other Even if you find a company that has good pay, they almost always under size their IT dept by 25-50%, and rarely promote internal training or continuing education, or offer entry level admin positions with the goal to skill up people.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim. I think if you want to go back into history and look at things, we had sysadmins who were not paid enough, but fell into "give a man a little power" trap and showed a side of themselves that we would rather not see, fed and reinforced by getting blamed for anything bad that happened 'on their watch'. The cumulative generational trauma on both sides of that relationship sets us up for a situation where outsourcing IT to someone who can't sass back or harass us about our deployment plans seems like a good deal. Yeah it costs about the same and it'll interrupt our roadmap but I get to 'stick it' to the IT department. Fuck those guys. Now it's been a while and people are starting to feel nostalgia for the old days.
vishnugupta 4y ago
Indeed. It's already getting difficult to hire a competent DBA who can end-to-end manage a MySQL on a bare metal; things like replication, backups, setting up data pipeline to data warehouse and what not. I'd give it about 5-8 years before DBA gets de-skilled. Similarly, managing servers through Chef/Puppet used to be a thing just a decade ago. Now with the onset of serverless, Lambda etc., it's slowly fading away.
- WJW 4y ago
  The total number of databases in the world has not gone down though, rather the opposite I suspect. It's not that there aren't any competent DBAs anymore, rather it's just that the cloud companies have better offers for the DBAs out there than most small/medium enterprises are willing to pay.
- Corrado 4y ago
  Yes, and it's very difficult to find punch card operators nowadays as well. Technology moves on, you have to move or get left behind.
worik 4y ago
> I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. I will do that. Horrible work. I would need >$200K/year....
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. A dubious conspiracy theory, frankly.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Not to mention, trivially debunked by typing the term into a search engine: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=%22cloud+repatriation%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=... I know HN comments bias heavily toward anti-cloud, but the suggestion that all of the search engines are conspiring together to bury some massive underground anti-cloud movement (that conveniently confirms anti-cloud beliefs but is unfortunately just hidden by evil search engines) is laughable.
  - fock 4y ago
    they however need the quotes. Otherwise you drown in noise about the great cloud. Have you tried searching for performance figures without disabling amazon, azure and google in the search? You won't find any. Still it's probably just the general noise of the fully oligopolized internet :).
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    The researcher may also be getting "personalized results" that have been biased by prior searches. I can't imagine how you'd even control for that.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I have never heard of 'cloud repatriation' until this very thread. So if that's what I'm looking for but I don't know what it's called, I have to use other terms, which are likely to be SEO'd to hell and back. That's the yardstick to use here.
badrchoubai 4y ago
Could you share some resources on this?
justapassenger 4y ago
I largely agree, but setting up mail server these days is way, way, way more complex than 10 years ago. It’s not people losing skills, it’s technology itself becoming overly complex.
- nocman 4y ago
  I disagree. It's a little more complicated (due to SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and that's annoying. However, I have set up multiple mail servers in the past 10 years, and I don't find the complexity to have increased that much. It is more complex, but not "way, way, way more complex".
phpisthebest 4y ago
I would make the case, especially in the broadcast / entertainment industry, that is was not the cloud that resulted in de-skilling but rather outsourcing / off shoring. There are famous examples of large media companies screwing over their internal IT depts through out the 2000's and 2010's
majormajor 4y ago
Nobody knew how to use the cloud when it first came out, and AWS and GCP are both fairly obtuse. IAM alone... Hell, for that matter, nobody knew how to set up a transcode server for live streaming 30 years ago - it's not some ancient art where we lost 50+ years of experience. I don't believe that people who can learn to operate cloud services can't learn how to rack servers and install software. Ten to fifteen years ago I was in companies where ten percent of the software team was managing the datacenter. Now ten percent is managing kubernetes and AWS and all that. I've seen the cloud be better for smaller shops since you no longer have to have that server management if you only have one or two people, but I haven't seen it "deskill" things so much as "differently skill" them in larger orgs.
grepfru_it 4y ago
> try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. Was just thinking last night that I need to stand up a mail server to send/receive email from my self hosted products. Then I thought of the leg work involved and said words I’ve never though I would say: “I should just use SES and be done with it”
tptacek 4y ago
We run all our own hardware and I'd still outsource the email server.
- tonypags 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely agree
hinkley 4y ago
> After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer Who could have possibly predicted that the trap-shaped box was a trap? The Trough Of Disillusionment is fast approaching. I'm surprised it's taken as long as it has. But then it always seems like the biggest, most expensive mistakes we make as an industry defend themselves, since nobody can bear to admit to themselves the magnitude of resources they set on fire in the process.
dgemm 4y ago
> Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. > As companies move their operations out to the cloud it's not the disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of skill-sets. Later they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. So in that respect it's similar to outsourcing any other aspect of your business - there are many examples of hollowed-out suppliers of manufactured products that no longer have the ability to build things themselves.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Yes I think that's right. It's a general pattern, Outsourcing disempowers in unexpected ways. The "finding", as it were, is that for some reason people in tech are surprised by this. They don't readily see that moving to the cloud increases entropy. You can't easily go back the other way, and so maybe companies should understand cloud as a one way process and think much more about the value they have and will be losing.
the_third_wave 4y ago
> the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. ... they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. ... nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer ... try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. So that is where the next boom will be: a sysadmin-on-demand service. Quick, someone create a start-up which connects those with the required skills to those who need those skills, charge a 30% fee and become the next greatest thing since sliced bread.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
I see this problem a lot where a powerful company has the $$$ to do SEO and basically push your search results in a way that is advantageous to them. For example, I moved to a place with black widows. Wanted to check the mortality rate. First post I find is one of those blog posts by a pest control company claiming a certain mortality rate. Search further for official resources and that number is wildly lower. Same thing with Jerusalem bugs. Wanted to check how careful I should be (I hike at night). First post a pest control company claiming that a bite can cause a fever. Further research into trusted sources mention no such thing. I hate what Google has become. I miss the days where the first result in Google was valuable. Pro-tip: if the post explains something and end with ‘conclusion:’ they’re pushing a product.
anopsguy 4y ago
I started my career as an ops guy supporting web hosting(around 10 yrs back). I learned a lot about Linux, automation and scripting along the way and became really good at setting things up(web/application servers, php, ffmpeg, mail servers etc.). I became pretty good at python too, also learned ds and algos(I didn't have a CS background). Moved to "devops" profiles since sys admins and regular ops guys stopped being valuable. Picked up puppet, ansible, aws/gcp. Moved to a big company, got bored out of my mind and decided to look for something else. Questions from the first round of an interview(they call the round - * basics) in a small company - Advanced aws and k8s(no Linux or anything else in my resume). I cracked the round but was expecting it to include at least some Linux questions. Next was the scripting round which had nonsense questions involving a lot of calculation(because ops folks only know basic scripting). Cracked that too. What I wanted to say is that there is no value in knowing Linux(to get a job, nothing beats knowledge on basics for debugging stuff once you land a job) and complex ops stuff since there is no market for these. Most of the people who were good at complex ops stuff moved into management roles seeing a lack of market for everything they knew. I am planning to leetcode some more and move to a dev profile after a year or two since there is no upward career path for all the ops stuff. There is too much to prepare for devops interviews since there is no standardized interview template either(advanced Linux, advanced networking, advanced k8s, cloud providers, everything in my resume [a ton of stuff that I'm slowly removing one by one], ds and algos, leetcode]. It is not that there aren't people out there with the required knowledge, we are just removing all the seemingly useless stuff from our resumes.
Dunedan 4y ago
> A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. Do you know what exactly increased in price? AWS usually doesn't increase prices, so I'd be interested if that was an exception or if that's a reason just given to cover another issue they had with AWS.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. That's the case for a lot of different things, ranging from tech to politics to pretty much anything, and doubly so if people are selling something or otherwise have a strong interest in pushing something. It's just so much easier to extol the virtues of something rather than point out the problems with something, especially when the problems are not obvious from "common sense" at a glance. "Searching for something" is often a very biased way of finding out about many things; it's not intentional, it's just that the "pro" and "anti" camps have vastly different levels of commitment to their cause, and you often need a lot of knowledge of context and nuances to make a fair judgement; any hack can say "X is brilliant!" but it's much harder to say "well, X is good in some cases, but [..]"
netfortius 4y ago
I am not sure when your student did the research, but it's been quite a few years (2017) since I used the 451 Research original *repatriation* article (as part of a larger set of data), when I was conducting an alternative architecture/skills/cost analysis, for a global company, in a private vs public cloud alternatives material. I could not immediately find the 451 Research link, but here is an identical copy of the most important picture in the article [1], which I found online. This most definitely needs re-validation. [1] https://files.ciokorea.com/archive/images/public-vs_-private-cloud-cost-comparison-100688350-primary_idge(1).gif https://files.ciokorea.com/archive/images/public-vs_-private...
hnarn 4y ago
> I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. Doing this correctly is mostly googling and using reference material to make sure you’ve set it up correctly, which means that anyone with decent Linux knowledge can do it. I would not trust anyone who claimed they could set up a mail server with no external references.

silasdavis 4y ago

Perhaps you could link the thesis?

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I'm definitely encouraging publication in a journal (maybe dealing with industry resilience). Also I want some students to come here and submit things via Show-HN, but they have to want to do that themselves.
- mstade 4y ago
  Your abstract is very intriguing, I’d love to read the paper! Is there anything beyond commenting we can do to help encourage publishing?

karmakurtisaani 4y ago

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

turtlebits 4y ago

I'm not sure I agree. It's not de-skilling, it's not needing to hire a skilled/specialists to implement/operate. If you're using the cloud, you almost never need to consult or assign work to a network engineer. IME, reliance on DBAs is also way down.

pojzon 4y ago

Very easy to find those ppl, you just have to pull them out from Cloud Providers Data Centers. But you have to pay them enough or that is going to be like pulling teeth out. And this is where the problems start.

withinboredom 4y ago

Interestingly, I took a ~5 year hiatus from writing code right smack in the beginning of the "cloud phenomenon," and upon returning, realized how much things had changed, with both skill levels and specialization. Before my hiatus, a dev could/would single-handedly run a site for a small/medium business. Handling everything from server procurement to FTPing the files to the server and even server maintenance. When I got back, this was "a big no-no" and mostly frowned upon. Everything was deployed by "git push" (fancy FTP?), problem with a server? just deploy a new one, and if an AWS region goes down ... it's ok, everyone else is down too and we have no idea when it will be back. That last sentence was something you never said to a boss back in '07-08. You would always know what was wrong and how bad it was within a few minutes of the issue, at least 90%+ of the time anyway. You could probably even guess how long it would be down for within ~10-15 minutes of discovering the issue. FWIW, I think small/medium size businesses were/are probably the most affected by cloudification since those had the "most to gain" in the beginning. Then again, those were the types of businesses that I had the most interaction with until 2014-ish, I don't know what it looked like from a big-business perspective.

Moissanite 4y ago
The key to this is: which is worse for middle management; a 15 minute outage which is your fault, or a 2 hour outage you can blame on AWS? Cloud is to the IT department as big consulting companies are to HR.
- gw99 4y ago
  I learned recently that the customers kick you in the balls once per minute either way. Loudly on Twitter.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Your average person doesn't listen to twitter, they listen to the mainstream news. And mainstream news will be either "company X offline for hours" if its just you, or "Amazon cloud outage takes multiple companies off line for hours" - the latter is better.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite message obviously heavily SEO'd up to the top, plus shill pieces pushing cloud services but presented as "critical". Dig deep if you want to find the real scale of the "anti-cloud" issues. Are you really suggesting that search engine providers are manipulating their own search results to bury some sort of hidden "truth" about a people leaving the cloud? Suggesting that people need to "dig deep" to find the real scale of the issue sounds a lot like the "do your own research" line that gets attached to dubious conspiracy theories. The simple explanation is that your student simply anchored her personal beliefs to an idea that this was a large movement, but her light research didn't match her pre-conceived beliefs. This is how conspiracy theories are born. Regardless, this claim doesn't hold up to even basic scrutiny. I just Googled for "cloud repatriation" and all of the results are think pieces about why moving out of the cloud is a good thing. Try it for yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=%22cloud+repatriation%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=... > A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. If you can't find sysadmins with basic competencies or engineers who can build systems as simple as buffering and transcoding, I can almost guarantee that the real issue is that you're not paying enough for the position. Either that, or the applicants can recognize from a mile away that your company is not the kind of place that skilled engineers actually want to work for. Don't mistake your lack of candidates for a lack of skill in the market.

dirtball_ 4y ago
That's right! It's a management problem through and through. Always has been.
majormajor 4y ago
It's less likely that search engines would manipulate this and much much much more likely that the SEO'd commercial content would be dominated by "move to the cloud!" type stuff because that's what's easy to sell these days. "Don't move to the cloud!" is hard to make money by selling to places not in the cloud. "Move out of the cloud" is harder to sell to places in the cloud than "move to the cloud" is to sell to places not in the cloud, because (a) bigger orgs with big budgets to make money off of tend to be older and not in the cloud fully in the first place and (b) moving out of the cloud is less turn-key - every client is going to be different and likely lower-margin than pushing clients into the same set of existing packaged cloud services. That said, I'm not aware of any companies from people in my network that are actively moving out of the cloud... so I also don't buy that it's a big trend.

Moissanite 4y ago

Very heartening to know other people are thinking about this. For about 4 or 5 years I've been warning about an equivalent problem in the HPC space, whereby even if on-prem is cheaper, companies will be forced to adopt cloud due to the lack of skilled bare-metal sysadmins. I should note that these warnings aren't accompanied by much sympathy; companies and academic institutions both do a profoundly terrible job at incubating the skills they need, then bleat at their local governments about new graduates not having the skills to be employable.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> companies will be forced to adopt cloud due to the lack of skilled bare-metal sysadmins. More likely that they're just not paying enough, and those skilled sysadmins would rather go to any other company that will pay them appropriately for their skills. This is just another take on the "nobody wants to work anymore" rant that happens when companies can't understand why nobody is accepting their open positions.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  I think both are actually true. Companies are not paying enough, but we also do not have as many opportunities (for SysAdmins) to learn things. Paid Internships, Jr Admin Roles, etc are fewer and far between, companies are looking for "experienced" people in a time where alot of the experience is retiring. Dont get me wrong there are plenty of us Gen X's out there with lots of experience but most of us are also massively over worked with limited opportunities given for us to train the next generation, so pay is only 1 part of this problem, head count is the other Even if you find a company that has good pay, they almost always under size their IT dept by 25-50%, and rarely promote internal training or continuing education, or offer entry level admin positions with the goal to skill up people.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim. I think if you want to go back into history and look at things, we had sysadmins who were not paid enough, but fell into "give a man a little power" trap and showed a side of themselves that we would rather not see, fed and reinforced by getting blamed for anything bad that happened 'on their watch'. The cumulative generational trauma on both sides of that relationship sets us up for a situation where outsourcing IT to someone who can't sass back or harass us about our deployment plans seems like a good deal. Yeah it costs about the same and it'll interrupt our roadmap but I get to 'stick it' to the IT department. Fuck those guys. Now it's been a while and people are starting to feel nostalgia for the old days.

vishnugupta 4y ago

Indeed. It's already getting difficult to hire a competent DBA who can end-to-end manage a MySQL on a bare metal; things like replication, backups, setting up data pipeline to data warehouse and what not. I'd give it about 5-8 years before DBA gets de-skilled. Similarly, managing servers through Chef/Puppet used to be a thing just a decade ago. Now with the onset of serverless, Lambda etc., it's slowly fading away.

WJW 4y ago
The total number of databases in the world has not gone down though, rather the opposite I suspect. It's not that there aren't any competent DBAs anymore, rather it's just that the cloud companies have better offers for the DBAs out there than most small/medium enterprises are willing to pay.
Corrado 4y ago
Yes, and it's very difficult to find punch card operators nowadays as well. Technology moves on, you have to move or get left behind.

worik 4y ago

> I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. I will do that. Horrible work. I would need >$200K/year....

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

> when you search on these terms the main engines (all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent with the scale of the phenomenon. A dubious conspiracy theory, frankly.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Not to mention, trivially debunked by typing the term into a search engine: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=%22cloud+repatriation%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cloud+repatriation%22&oq=... I know HN comments bias heavily toward anti-cloud, but the suggestion that all of the search engines are conspiring together to bury some massive underground anti-cloud movement (that conveniently confirms anti-cloud beliefs but is unfortunately just hidden by evil search engines) is laughable.
- fock 4y ago
  they however need the quotes. Otherwise you drown in noise about the great cloud. Have you tried searching for performance figures without disabling amazon, azure and google in the search? You won't find any. Still it's probably just the general noise of the fully oligopolized internet :).
- withinboredom 4y ago
  The researcher may also be getting "personalized results" that have been biased by prior searches. I can't imagine how you'd even control for that.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I have never heard of 'cloud repatriation' until this very thread. So if that's what I'm looking for but I don't know what it's called, I have to use other terms, which are likely to be SEO'd to hell and back. That's the yardstick to use here.

badrchoubai 4y ago

Could you share some resources on this?

justapassenger 4y ago

I largely agree, but setting up mail server these days is way, way, way more complex than 10 years ago. It’s not people losing skills, it’s technology itself becoming overly complex.

nocman 4y ago
I disagree. It's a little more complicated (due to SPF/DKIM/DMARC), and that's annoying. However, I have set up multiple mail servers in the past 10 years, and I don't find the complexity to have increased that much. It is more complex, but not "way, way, way more complex".

phpisthebest 4y ago

I would make the case, especially in the broadcast / entertainment industry, that is was not the cloud that resulted in de-skilling but rather outsourcing / off shoring. There are famous examples of large media companies screwing over their internal IT depts through out the 2000's and 2010's

majormajor 4y ago

Nobody knew how to use the cloud when it first came out, and AWS and GCP are both fairly obtuse. IAM alone... Hell, for that matter, nobody knew how to set up a transcode server for live streaming 30 years ago - it's not some ancient art where we lost 50+ years of experience. I don't believe that people who can learn to operate cloud services can't learn how to rack servers and install software. Ten to fifteen years ago I was in companies where ten percent of the software team was managing the datacenter. Now ten percent is managing kubernetes and AWS and all that. I've seen the cloud be better for smaller shops since you no longer have to have that server management if you only have one or two people, but I haven't seen it "deskill" things so much as "differently skill" them in larger orgs.

grepfru_it 4y ago

> try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. Was just thinking last night that I need to stand up a mail server to send/receive email from my self hosted products. Then I thought of the leg work involved and said words I’ve never though I would say: “I should just use SES and be done with it”

tptacek 4y ago

We run all our own hardware and I'd still outsource the email server.

tonypags 4y ago
Yes, absolutely agree

hinkley 4y ago

> After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. But they can't. Because nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer Who could have possibly predicted that the trap-shaped box was a trap? The Trough Of Disillusionment is fast approaching. I'm surprised it's taken as long as it has. But then it always seems like the biggest, most expensive mistakes we make as an industry defend themselves, since nobody can bear to admit to themselves the magnitude of resources they set on fire in the process.

dgemm 4y ago

> Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. > As companies move their operations out to the cloud it's not the disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of skill-sets. Later they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. So in that respect it's similar to outsourcing any other aspect of your business - there are many examples of hollowed-out suppliers of manufactured products that no longer have the ability to build things themselves.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Yes I think that's right. It's a general pattern, Outsourcing disempowers in unexpected ways. The "finding", as it were, is that for some reason people in tech are surprised by this. They don't readily see that moving to the cloud increases entropy. You can't easily go back the other way, and so maybe companies should understand cloud as a one way process and think much more about the value they have and will be losing.

the_third_wave 4y ago

> the big issue is not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling. ... they don't even know who to hire or how to write the JD to bring people back in. ... nobody knows about how to set-up and run that any longer ... try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. So that is where the next boom will be: a sysadmin-on-demand service. Quick, someone create a start-up which connects those with the required skills to those who need those skills, charge a 30% fee and become the next greatest thing since sliced bread.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

I see this problem a lot where a powerful company has the $$$ to do SEO and basically push your search results in a way that is advantageous to them. For example, I moved to a place with black widows. Wanted to check the mortality rate. First post I find is one of those blog posts by a pest control company claiming a certain mortality rate. Search further for official resources and that number is wildly lower. Same thing with Jerusalem bugs. Wanted to check how careful I should be (I hike at night). First post a pest control company claiming that a bite can cause a fever. Further research into trusted sources mention no such thing. I hate what Google has become. I miss the days where the first result in Google was valuable. Pro-tip: if the post explains something and end with ‘conclusion:’ they’re pushing a product.

anopsguy 4y ago

I started my career as an ops guy supporting web hosting(around 10 yrs back). I learned a lot about Linux, automation and scripting along the way and became really good at setting things up(web/application servers, php, ffmpeg, mail servers etc.). I became pretty good at python too, also learned ds and algos(I didn't have a CS background). Moved to "devops" profiles since sys admins and regular ops guys stopped being valuable. Picked up puppet, ansible, aws/gcp. Moved to a big company, got bored out of my mind and decided to look for something else. Questions from the first round of an interview(they call the round - * basics) in a small company - Advanced aws and k8s(no Linux or anything else in my resume). I cracked the round but was expecting it to include at least some Linux questions. Next was the scripting round which had nonsense questions involving a lot of calculation(because ops folks only know basic scripting). Cracked that too. What I wanted to say is that there is no value in knowing Linux(to get a job, nothing beats knowledge on basics for debugging stuff once you land a job) and complex ops stuff since there is no market for these. Most of the people who were good at complex ops stuff moved into management roles seeing a lack of market for everything they knew. I am planning to leetcode some more and move to a dev profile after a year or two since there is no upward career path for all the ops stuff. There is too much to prepare for devops interviews since there is no standardized interview template either(advanced Linux, advanced networking, advanced k8s, cloud providers, everything in my resume [a ton of stuff that I'm slowly removing one by one], ds and algos, leetcode]. It is not that there aren't people out there with the required knowledge, we are just removing all the seemingly useless stuff from our resumes.

Dunedan 4y ago

> A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to running their own services. Do you know what exactly increased in price? AWS usually doesn't increase prices, so I'd be interested if that was an exception or if that's a reason just given to cover another issue they had with AWS.

Beltalowda 4y ago

netfortius 4y ago

I am not sure when your student did the research, but it's been quite a few years (2017) since I used the 451 Research original *repatriation* article (as part of a larger set of data), when I was conducting an alternative architecture/skills/cost analysis, for a global company, in a private vs public cloud alternatives material. I could not immediately find the 451 Research link, but here is an identical copy of the most important picture in the article [1], which I found online. This most definitely needs re-validation. [1] https://files.ciokorea.com/archive/images/public-vs_-private-cloud-cost-comparison-100688350-primary_idge(1).gif https://files.ciokorea.com/archive/images/public-vs_-private...

hnarn 4y ago

> I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server these days. Doing this correctly is mostly googling and using reference material to make sure you’ve set it up correctly, which means that anyone with decent Linux knowledge can do it. I would not trust anyone who claimed they could set up a mail server with no external references.